Saturday, August 14, 2010

Bait and Switch - The Cloud Blog

Excerpt from a Steve Gillmor post

Historically, Google’s infatuation with Open as a brand name has had its challenges in resolving the conflict between standards and speed to market. A minor false note was struck early when Gmail sprouted video chat on top of its Gtalk/Chat product, using some code that looked suspiciously like a Flash container (just right click the video frame to see what I mean.) More recently, the language around Flash at this year’s Google I/O announcements redefined Flash as open by its role in giving users a choice. It might have made an interesting exercise to ask the Ovangelists what they thought of the newspeak, but the Apple/Google falling out seemed to trump the usual hippie language of yore. Nothing, however, prepared us for the Google Verizon putsch of recent days, where Google made it clear that the FCC had better crawl back into its cave before Eric and the boys get really mad. For those of us who used to refer to the commission as the F-CC in the good old days when Nixon used it to cow CBS away from its antiwar coverage, it’s astonishing to feel sorry for the agency. But a monster carrier and a run-away search monopoly will do that for you.